user manual

278 BES Developer’s Guide
System Contracts
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Certificate authentication: when an SSL or HTTPS client request is initiated,
Borland Enterprise Server responds by presenting its digital certificate to
the client. The client then verifies the digital certificate and an SSL
connection is established. The CertAuthenticator class then extracts data
from the client's digital certificate to determine which Borland Enterprise
Server User owns the certificate and then retrieves the authenticated User
from the Borland Enterprise Server security realm.
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You can also use mutual authentication. In this case, Borland Enterprise
Server not only authenticates itself, it also requires authentication from the
requesting client. Clients are required to submit digital certificates issued by
a trusted certificate authority. Mutual authentication is useful when you
must restrict access to trusted clients only. For example, you might restrict
access by accepting only clients with digital certificates provided by you.
For more information, see "Getting Started with Security" in the Developer's
Guide.
Security Map
In Section 7.5 of the Connectors 1.0 specification, a number of possible
options are identified for defining a Resource Principal on the behalf of whom
sign-on is being performed. VisiConnect implements the Principal Mapping
option identified in the specification.
Under this option, a resource principal is determined by mapping from the
identity of the initiating caller principal for the invoking component. The
resulting resource principal does not inherit the identity of security attributes of
the principal that is it mapped from. Instead, the resource principal derives its
identity and security attributes based on the defined mapping. Thus, to enable
and use container-managed sign-on, VisiConnect provides the Security Map
to specify the initiating principal association with a resourceprincipal.
Expanding upon this model, VisiConnect provides a mechanism to map
initiating caller roles to resource roles.
If container-managed sign-on is requested by the component and no Security
Map is configured for the deployed Resource Adapter, an attempt is made to
obtain the connection using a null JAAS Subject object. This is supported
based upon the Resource Adapter implementation.
While the defined connection management system contracts define how
security information is exchanged between the Borland Enterprise Server and
the Resource Adapter, the determination to use container-managed sign-on or
component-managed sign-on is based on deployment information defined for
the component requesting a connection.
The Security Map is specified with the security-map element in the ra-
borland.xml deployment descriptor. This element defines the initiating role
association with a resource role. Each security-map element provides a
mechanism to define appropriate resource role values for the Resource
Adapter and EIS sign-on processing. The security-map elements provide the
means to specify a defined set of initiating roles and the corresponding